Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday October 06, 2010 @11:50AM
from the for-you-uriah dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Switching from 1600x1200 to wide 1680x1050 to HD 1600x900, we are losing more and more vertical space, thus it is becoming less and less simple to read a full A4 page or a web page or a function call. What's the solution for retaining the screen height we need to be productive?"

That's my solution too: I have one "real" panel (a 20" 1600x1200 4x3 panel) and one "short screen" panel (22" 1680x1050 16x9) that is rotated 90 degrees. Word processing docs and web pages work great on the short screen (wide screen) when rotated. In fact, I am typing this post on the rotated screen right now.

If your display has pixels large enough that your eye can resolve them, the density is too low. If you have a high enough resolution display, all the psycho-visual tricks like anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rendering become unnecessary. Remember that fonts sizes are based off the size of your physical display, and have no relation to the number of pixels used to render them.

Remember that fonts sizes are based off the size of your physical display, and have no relation to the number of pixels used to render them. If you're lucky enough to use a program built to do that.

Fixed that too. Go take a look at Steam or Winamp* for some nice popular counter-examples, and I'm sure there's loads more. Sure there's "skins" that might have bigger fonts defined, but its up to the user to locate and install such skins -- they don't come with the programs.

Of course there's a very good reason why programs fail to handle font sizing properly -- its hard! Laying out controls is a pain in the ass as it is.. trying to make them dynamically adjust to match the size of your display and/or no

I have two monitors; one is portrait, and one is landscape. When I turned the portrait one (an HP 2207, it came in landscape configuration), OS X knew it had been turned, rotated the portion of the desktop accordingly, and the only thing left for me to do was choose how I wanted the portrait space to sit adjoining the landscape space.

If I need to work on a page, I usually use the portrait space. If I need to work in landscape (I'm a photographer, it's common), I use the landscape space.

I think this problem has been solved, and solved very well, for quite some time. You can use one monitor like my HP that is aware of its orientation, or you can use more than one and have one or more of each. Of course, this does assume that the OS is competent to deal with it, but I know that at least, OS X is.

This is brilliant. The topic of the article is, "why are we losing vertical pixels". Thanks to Libertarian loonyism, I've now read through comments on land ownership and the big bad government, health care reform, and now overly dramatized, tough-guy hypotheticals, complete with gender stereotyping (hint: most mugging victims are male).

It's harder to design menus for left or right positioning because our languages flows horizontal, not vertical.

For example if I drag the Windows tab bar to the left ("zip"), it creates a mess. It's taking up FAR more room on the left than it did on the bottom. The same would be true if you moved the Web browser or Word processor menu to the left or right.

People who don't like guessing what the picture is supposed to represent. "Does that S-shaped picture mean save, search, snake, or something else entirely?"

BTW one of my chief annoyances with the Mac OS is the inability to quickly and easily switch between windows. You have to juggle windows around on the screen. i.e. It's stuck in the pre-95 era. The Windows & Linux tab bars are a very easy solution to that problem.

That annoyed me too, at first, but eventually I realized it was just wasted space. It's far easier to simply trigger Expose to find the window I want, rather than associate which box in the tab bar is associated with which window on my desktop... especially if you have multiple windows from the same program open. On Windows you need the title bar text to distinguish between multiple instances/windows of the same program. On OS X, just select the one with the contents you're looking for.

So, you're judging the Mac OS based on your experience with a version that was released 13 years ago? Should I judge Windows based on my experience with Win98? Should I judge Linux based on my experience with Slackware 3.0?

I know this isn't a discussion about Linux, and I'm not trying to turn it into one. But I will say one of the things I love about KDE3.5 is that I can adjust all the toolbars the way I like, and I like to put them on the side. I've also got a monitor tilted 90 degrees, for the same reason: I want to see a whole page at a time, and want as much vertical space as possible. So for someone with those requirements, KDE3.5 is a pretty sweet desktop. I don't know if KDE4 lets you have that same flexibility or

The ribbon can be minimized, double click one of the tabs (Home, etc) and it will shrink the tab bar.

You can then access everything via hotkey or click on the tab and then the item you want. For many tasks your average "clicks per action" will be around 2 anyway (clicking a tab group, then an action). This just makes it a flat 2.0, instead of maybe, 1.6 or whatever. If you're doing some action repeatedly, it's always smart to learn the hotkey.

A year or so ago, I picked up a Dell 30" monitor with 2560x1600 resolution. It pretty much solves all of your monitor issues. The only concern, is that you need a video card capable of dual-link dvi output (Nearly all recent gaming cards).

IF YOU READ THE ARTICLE you will notice he is complaining about the drop in vertical resolution on laptops where it is not very convenient to carry along an extra monitor and its near impossible to type or use a trackpad holding a laptop sideways.

A laptop with a 1600x1200 pixel screen was typically very high end in the past, very high end laptops now come with 1920x1200 screens.

A more mid range machine might typically have had a 1280x1024 screen, and now come with a 1680x1050 one.

A low end one might have had a 1024x768 screen and now come with a 1280x800 one.

We haven't lost vertical pixels, we've gained horizontal ones.

As for the aspect ratio making it harder to view vertical things, I also vote this just plain wrong. You can still view your vertical things with the same height – just now you can view two of them! I love being able to have 2-3 code windows side by side, it's great for cross referencing.

not really - right now i'm using a 17in 4:3 with 1280x1024 res.. show me anything under 20in with more than 1k vertical? we are losing vertical - they might be gained on the horizontal.. but actually most of the new ones have overall less pixes for the same quoted screen size in inches..

also note the last time you saw a monitor quote it's dot pitch? LCD's don't apply to the prior way of measuring it because they don't have separate sub pixels but what dot pitch did enable was easy way of comparing pixel density from one monitor to another..

considering that higher density screens are more expensive to make and are more likely to have defects in large runs - there no doubt in my mind that monitor makers where happy to stop using dot pitch and not replace it.

the fact that when you go to buy a laptop you can get a 15in screen with a 1367x768 which which would be equivalent to a.278mm dot pitch - keep in mind you could get CRT's with dot pitch ~.2mm around 10 years ago. where is my LCD with that option?

I suspect it's Windows he's talking about. The common way to use Windows is to have all your windows maximized and most apps are written with this in mind. And most people using Windows have a nasty habit of having fairly low-res monitors (I know several "hardcore" gamers who have $2,500+ rigs hooked up to cheap-o monitors only capable of 1440x900 or so, but great response times though).

Your screens are getting more dpi and more inches per screen. You're getting relatively fewer vertical pixels because you're simply getting more horizontal pixels. This is an improvement, especially considering most people don't need tall screens. If you're one of the few who do, do what the guy posted and rotate 90 degrees.

It's not an improvement and there's no way to sugar coat it with the excuse that you're getting more pixels overall. In almost all use cases text is rendered on screen horizontally (even in East Asia). Losing vertical resolution reduces the amount of information you can fit on the screen for any particular task. The extra horizontal space doesn't factor in since the only way to leverage it is with long lines of text which has negative consequences for ease of reading.

We're getting less vertical resolution because there is a convergence of resolutions used for HD television displays and humdrum consumer level monitors. The manufacturers are taking advantage of the economies of scale. For those of us that were enjoying 1600x1200 back when everyone was wallowing in 640x480 and 800x600 it's a step backwards. Most people don't know what they're missing out on so there is no demand to do better.

If you've got a 1366x768 panel then you don't have a 1080P display, you have a 720P display. The fact that many 720P displays can handle 1080i/p signals doesn't make it a full HD display, and I've never seen one advertised as such.

Please provide examples of a tv claiming to be "Full HD" that doesn't have a 1920x1080 panel.

I do see this happening in monitors. Sometimes, what you end up is a computer monitor optimized for movies, but not computer stuff as the pixels are actually wider to fit the screen, instead of being nice square pixels where a circle in the native resolution is actually round. So, it's like "fake" widescreen which is good if you're gonna watch movies but not edit text.

Of course, I'm still trying to figure out why a year after I bought my Acer 23" flatscreen with 1920x1080, I can't even buy the equivalent

I use three monitors for my development work. One of these monitors is a traditional 4:3 LCD; I use this to refer to longer documents and source code. The other two monitors are my "main" monitors and are identical 1600x1050 native resolution models. I use these for my IDE/editor and debugging panels. It's the perfect setup for me.

I'm not sure what you're on, but reading narrow columns is way faster than reading wide lines. That's why newspapers have columns. One of the many deficiencies of CSS is that it's practically impossible to a newspaper-like layout which works at any screen size (adapting the number of columns as needed).

There is no significant difference in latency or duration for vertical vs. horizontal saccades (eg: see [nih.gov] ), and you're dead wrong about reading speed: In English, the optimal column width for fast reading is somewhere between 50 [google.com] and 100 [wichita.edu] characters per line, depending on exact circumstances.

However, there are two other relevant facts: 1) The lower visual hemifield has a larger cortical representation than the upper visual hemifield, and shows modest improvements in visual performance [sciencedirect.com] (this is unsurprising, since our hands/tools/ground near us is usually in our lower hemifield) and 2) We can move our head side-to-side more rapidly, and with a larger range of motion than we can up and down, which changes some saccade distributions [physiology.org].

Irregardless of the mechanics of the situation, reading is a highly trained activity, and direction of reading is not universal. Chinese, for instance, can be read top-to-bottom, or with either horizontal possibility as the initial direction, with the reader cued by slightly differing strokes and punctuation . I'm not aware of any bottom-to-top sequential reading in any culture, which is probably due to the above mentioned processing differences. However, there are also mixed reading sequences that use multiple horizontal and vertical elements in a single block, like Mayan hieroglyphs (2x2 blocks LR->TB within block, blocks are read TB->LR ) or the Korean Hangul system (variety of block sizes, read TB->RL). Arguably, the latter systems are most efficient in terms of leveraging the early geometry of the visual system (log-polar [bu.edu], with resolution dropping exponentially with distance from the fovea.

I think this trend has more to do with the size and shape of laptops than anything else. A keyboard and touchpad usually don't need to take up a 4:3 rectangular space, and space is at a premium for laptops.

Yeah, no kidding. 1600x1200 displays weren't cheap when they were common, and were only to be found on the high end monitors and latter the very high end laptops of the time. It took me all of ten seconds to got to dell.com and find a laptop that was 1920x1200. I don't know why people keep acting like you are losing something going from 1600x1200 to 1920x1200.

Have you ever actually benchmarked video performance on a rotated display? Even with hardware supported rotation, the framebuffer read-out order is no longer consecutive which completely fucks video performance.

I seriously can't believe the suggestions... It's like saying "What happened to all the compact cars?" and you reply "Stop whining, just crush your car down to size." Why can't we just buy something in the form factor we want?

I totally agree. I tried "rotated" for a while and performance and overall experience was bad. The colors looked slightly different and unbalanced. My guess is that viewing angles are optimized for using the monitor in "normal" (un-rotated) mode, and the average viewing angle may not be normal to the screen surface. So when you rotate the thing it all gets messed up. There are also more subtle issues: how to handle sub-pixel anti-aliasing (like in Windows ClearType) when one monitor is rotated and the other one is not?

What monitor type are you using? Remember that most PC monitors are TN type, which have terrible vertical viewing angles. You don't normally notice vertical angles -- until you turn it sideways and discover massive color shifts. IPS screens (Dell has a whole line now) are vastly better.

Software (or rather, the OpenGL or Direct3D driver) has absolutely no problem rendering everything 90 degrees transformed. 2D is a different problem, but 2D is trivial in software on any remotely recent system. You can also render it on a texture and let the 3D hardware handle the problem.

16:10 computer displays were great for watching 16:9 video on a computer. They had room outside the video for playback controls or status information. With a 16:9 display, you can't reasonably have any permanent status or controls without them overlapping the video.

Personally, I find on-screen controls incredibly distracting. When I watch a movie, I want to focus on the movie itself, not a GUI, just like you would in a movie theatre. A keyboard is fine for controls, at least in MPlayer which is designed for watching a movie instead of a GUI.

Try scrolling your document to see the portions above or below the screen using the handy scroll bar to the right or left of your document. It's amazing! You only work with one page at a time anyway, get over not seeing all of it, or just print it out, gammit!

Also, why can't I have a screen view that flips 180 so I can watch movies upside-down? Fix that before we "fix" not being able to scroll, I mean, "view" your +5 Tall Document of Nonsense. Don't make me come down there! Get on my lawn and subscribe to my newsletter!

You're not losing pixels, you're just throwing numbers out there without actually knowing what you're talking about.
1600x1200 is UXGA. 1650x1080 is WSXGA+, which is the widescreen variant of SXGA+ (1400x1050). If you want widescreen based on the 1600x1200 resolution, buy a WUXGA monitor(1920x1200). Pretty simple, really. You only "lose" pixels if you don't research the monitor you are purchasing.

It really bugs the hell out of me the way manufacturers like sony and asus have the cheek to put out a laptop with a 1440x900 screen or a 1600x900 screen and call it "Full HD". As far as I'm concerned Full HD is 1080 pixels vertical and 1920 pixels horizontal, since when does 900 = 1080 and 1440 = 1920?????Unsatisfied with the screen res on my laptop I decided to upgrade it myself.Luckily after a long phone call to a supplier, I was able to convince them to send me a 1920x1200 LCD panel that was a direct replacement for the 1440x900 panel, They told me it was unlikely to work, but it works great:) If anyone is interested I used a panel designed for a sony and fitted it to an asus g70. It cost me about 160ukp for the panel and about an hour to fit. I was able to try my g70 on a 1920x1200 panel first to see if it would drive it. Most LVDS LCD panels are interchangeable provided that they use the same backlighting technology.Size and aspect ratio can be an issue too. I'm sure that case modders could make even a screen of totally the wrong aspect look ok. I guess it boils down to having the bottle to mod your brand new laptop. Yeah yeah I know someone is going to reply telling me the g70 is 2 years old, well simplyasus were selling off old stock cheaply, so I got a bargain.

The linked article was talking about laptop screens, where that's not really an option. I could see some humorous results if you tried. The solution is just as simple: Develop on an external monitor (optionally rotated 90 degrees).

Because we're not all exactly like you, we all have different work habits and needs.

For example, last week I had to travel a couple hours to visit a client. I could have driven, but I chose to take the train. Part of the logic behind this decision was so that I could use the time more productively. As this was "work time", shouldn't I have been working, according to your logic?

Additionally, I'm self employed and work from my home office most days. Sometimes though, I like to get a change of scener

What monitors do you recommend that have worthwhile vertical viewing angles? I tried rotating one of my screens but it seems the cheapo Dell displays at my office just aren't designed for above/below viewing. Makes me wonder who was on the design team that thought adding rotation to a cheap panel that has no vertical viewability was a good idea...

What monitors do you recommend that have worthwhile vertical viewing angles? I tried rotating one of my screens but it seems the cheapo Dell displays at my office just aren't designed for above/below viewing. Makes me wonder who was on the design team that thought adding rotation to a cheap panel that has no vertical viewability was a good idea...

People want monitors cheap, so the manufacturers make cheap monitors. The most common type of panel is the Twisted Nematic (TN) - which has fairly limited viewing range and color depth. (According to Wikipedia - most TN panels are actually only 6 bit per color channel, they fake 24-bit color via flickering and dithering)

I got the HP ZR24W - it's a 24" 1920x1200 monitor that sells for around $400. It's my first LCD monitor (apart from laptops). Its panel is some variant of the In-Plane Switching technolo

Have you ever tried to use a 16:9 monitor turned sideways? It's ridiculous. The viewing angle on the vertical (now, the horizontal) part of the monitor is terrible so you have to be sitting exactly in front of it or you can't see it. This is no good if you have 2 monitors. The monitor is so tall that your focus on the top and bottom parts of the monitor are different.

...Nearly, because you want to be viewing it from just slightly above...

That is not physically possible since the monitor is taller than my torso. It is a 22" display.

My 22" display is about 25" tall including the border, but not the stand. The stand, at the lowest possible setting, adds another inch or two. With my chair at the highest setting my eyes are about at the center of the display. I cannot comfortably reach my keyboard at that height and 5'9 my feet barely touch the floor. So the goal of getting my eye level to the top of the display seems impossible unless the

The trouble with turning an LCD monitor sideways is that text looks terrible. I use a widescreen monitor rotated for code visibility purposes. The excess cruft of IDE subwindows is much less disruptive. However, text (and even code) is significantly more readable (and less painful) on the smaller, non-rotated monitor.

Windows doesn't seem to properly do sub-pixel rendering on a rotated monitor -- all of the ClearType profiles are based on the configuration of subpixels in a normally-oriented monitor. Moreover, the settings don't seem to be on a per-monitor basis, which means that I would get to choose to have one of my two monitors look terrible and one be legible. Does anyone know of a ClearType (or similar) tool for Windows which properly adjusts to rotated screens? (I'm off to Google it... maybe it's easier to find this year?)

Then there's the issue of viewing angles -- most LCDs have a wide horizontal viewing range, but a narrow vertical viewing angle range. Rotating the monitor flips that. (It's not as big of a deal as you'd think, in that I sit in generally the same place, but it makes it harder to read stuff there if someone is sitting next to me.)

ClearType can't fix that problem. The issue is that ClearType is limited by the physical layout of the RGB sub-pixels in the display. LCD typically have the RGB sub-pixels as 3 vertical bars side by side (in the orientation for which the display was designed). That allows for sub-pixel rendering in one dimension (normally horizontal), but not in the other (normally vertical) dimension. Rotating the display changes the orientation of the sub-pixels, so there is nothing ClearType can do to enhance it.

The fundamental problem is that many manufacturers are trying to standardize on the 16:9 format used for HDTV. While a wide field of view is great for movies and TV, it sucks for most computer displays. I only buy 16:10 or 5:4 displays for my computer, if a laptop is only offered with 16:9, it is removed from consideration. As many comments have suggested, for most computer work, display height is more critical than display width. Yes, the wide formats work better for notebook and tablet form factors, but 16:9 is just not a good choice, stick with 16:10.

I rather think it depends on what you're doing. I work in publishing, and there are reasons most books are the way they are. Wide columns of text can be difficult to read. Obviously on a computer you're not just reading columns of text, but it does make a difference.

If you've got a iPad, Kindle, what not, try reading in landscape vs portrait. Not everybody likes the same thing, but in general I prefer narrow columns.

PHP3 prevented you to perform -any- operations in class member variable initialization. Not even string constants concatenation, so you could split lines to avoid run-on statements.I once had to initialize a string with a very, very long (non-SQL) database request and couldn't even split that. I ended up with a single line over 2000 characters long, which ended with ";//sorry

Apple used to have an A4 monitor: portrait and indeed the size of a sheet of A4 paper, and "paper white" CRT type. From the time that a colour monitor was not standard. It never gained much traction, but for word processing it was pretty cool (I've actually worked with one for a while).

I can imagine web browsing also works quite well on such a monitor - but well at the time the www was barely there yet.

OTOH: those modern widescreens you can consider as two portrait monitors seamlessly linked together. Eve

I think you hit it on the head.. this whole fixation on 1080p crap. If anything, DPI for computer monitors has been declining the past five years after a slow march to near 100dpi from 72 dpi. I am running two fairly ancient Formac 1600x1200 20"ers which are eactly 100dpi - circa 2002. Is it asking so much that 8 years later we have 2400x1800 on a 20" monitor for a reasonable price? Its become hard now to even find 100 dpi monitors at 20".